cultural mobility

pop culture

Chinese Mexicans celebrate repatriation to Mexico

AP Photo: Marco Ugarte. IMAGE: Juan Chiu Trujillo, a Chinese Mexican, weeps as he recounts his life story in Mexico City.

10 hr ago By Olga R. Rodriguez

Dozens of Chinese Mexicans and their descendants planned to meet Saturday to celebrate their return to Mexico.

MEXICO CITY — Juan Chiu Trujillo was 5 years old when he left his native Mexico for a visit to his father's hometown in southern China. He was 35 when he returned.
As Chiu vacationed with his parents, brother and two sisters in Guangdong province, Mexico erupted into xenophobia fueled by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and aimed at its small, relatively prosperous Chinese minority. Authorities backed by mobs rounded up Chinese citizens, pressured them to sell their businesses and forced many to cross into the United States.
Unable to return to their home, hotel and restaurant in the southern border city of Tapachula, the Chius stayed in China and began a new life.
Chiu's father took a job at a relative's bakery and his children began learning Chinese. But their life was soon turned upside down as China was invaded by the Japanese, endured World War II and then suffered a civil war that led to a victory by communist forces that persecuted religious people. In 1941, the family fled to Macau, then a Portuguese colony.
They never stopped dreaming of Mexico, and Juan Chiu Trujillo returned in November 1960. He came back with his pregnant wife and four children and with 300 other Chinese Mexicans after President Adolfo Lopez Mateos, trying to improve Mexico's global image, paid for their travel expenses and decreed that they would be legally allowed to live in Mexico. They were eventually granted Mexican citizenship.
Dozens of those Chinese Mexicans and their descendants planned a gathering Saturday at a Chinese restaurant in Mexico City to celebrate for the first time the anniversary of their return, share memories and pay tribute to the late Lopez Mateos, who was being represented by his daughter.
For many, the commemoration has brought reflection on their status as Chinese Mexicans. It's a group that feels deeply Mexican but also has been scarred by persecution by their countrymen and still faces ethnic prejudice, despite growing acceptance.
"I thought: 'My children need to know this history. They need to know where we come from, and they need to know how much hard work it has taken for us to be here,'" said Chiu's youngest son, Ignacio Chiu Chan, a 46-year-old lawyer.
Chiu Chan began a Facebook page to share photographs of the repatriation that he found in his father's photo albums and to collect the stories of other Chinese Mexicans who were brought back by Lopez Mateos. So far, more than 260 people have joined his page, sharing images and recounting family stories.
Chiu Chan, who is married to a Mexican woman of Spanish and Indian descent and has four children, said he struggled with his identity while growing up because of bullying and got into several fights because of name calling.
He was a young bachelor when a group of elders invited him to lunch at a restaurant in Mexico City's tiny Chinatown. Three young women were at the table and he was asked to say which one he would like to marry.
"I thought, 'What are these dudes talking about?'" he recalled. "For the first time I felt Mexican and thought, 'I don't belong to this.'"
Large numbers of Chinese began arriving in northern Mexico in the late 1800s, drawn by jobs in railroad construction and cotton. The country represented a haven from the United States, which had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1882 law that banned Chinese immigration.
But from the moment they began to arrive, they faced racism, which was exacerbated during the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, when the country was trying to build a national identity that celebrated the mixture of Indian and Spanish cultures.
Mexican women who married Chinese men were considered traitors, and in some cases families disowned them. With the Great Depression, large numbers of destitute Mexicans began returning home from the United States and resentment about the financial success of Chinese people grew.
"Even though there was a small number of Chinese people, their economic prowess and their position in the labor force made them a threat," said Fredy Gonzalez, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University who is studying the repatriations.
In the northern border state of Sonora, anti-Chinese leagues formed and thousands of Chinese were taken to the border with the U.S. and forced to cross. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act they were immediately detained by U.S. immigration officials and sent to China.
In 1930, Mexico had 18,000 Chinese citizens and Mexicans of Chinese descent. By 1940, there were only 4,800, Gonzalez said.
Today, there are at least 70,000 Chinese citizens and Chinese Mexicans in the country, according to a report in 2008 by the Foreign Relations Department.
In China, Chiu Trujillo's Mexican mother spoke to her children in Spanish and often sang Mexican ranchera songs so loudly that she could be heard all around the stream where she washed the family's laundry.
Their mother also instilled in her children devotion for the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint.
"We would recite the rosary in Spanish, she would teach us," Chiu, 87, remembered during an interview in his small apartment in Mexico City's rough La Merced neighborhood, its walls decorated with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Jesus Christ, a couple of Chinese calendars and lots of family photographs. "She would tell us, don't forget you are Catholics, don't lose your religion."
Three years after his mother and two siblings returned, Chiu, his pregnant Chinese wife and four children finally were flown to Mexico.
After working at his brother's grocery store in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, he decided to move to Mexico City, where he worked as a cook and eventually opened his own cafeteria.
"I was able to give my sons an education. The boys all graduated from college," Chiu said. "The oldest is an accountant, the second is a chemist, the third is a mathematician, and the young one is a musician."
Chiu said he always felt more Mexican than Chinese.

"I have always thought that wherever you can find tranquility, that's where your home is," he said.

Legitimate Rape

The Excellent Absurdity of Legitimate Rape: A Note on Art and History

 

The American mind seems to have a limited capacity for dealing with either the diachronic or synchronic aspects of issues.  That is unfortunate.  However, if we seek to overcome those limits, we discover a profound need to deal with the absurd.  In August 2012, we had occasion to consider the excellent absurdity of legitimate rape.

Representative Todd Akin of Missouri said on public television”

It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare.  If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Had Akin had momentarily become the anti-hero of Voltaire’s novel Candide and were his unguarded remarks  informed by the twisted beliefs of Dr. Pangloss?  Was he at all aware of what Mark Twain, a famous writer from Missouri, had said about the madness of “rape” in King Leopold’s Soliloquy?  Perhaps not.  Few of our politicians can demonstrate cultural literacy.  But from the angle of literary analysis, it seemed Akin had uttered a proposition about “rape” that was itself “legitimated” by the genocidal “rape” of indigenous peoples to obtain the Lebensraum that is now the United States of America.  From the angles of cultural analysis and biology, it seemed Akin was dead wrong,  because “legitimate rape” of the African female body during the period of slavery so frequently resulted in pregnancy. Akin suffered from the convenient amnesia that for thousands of years has made rape legitimate. Much of the outrage about his statement pertained, I suspect, to his treachery in revealing a secret that was no secret.

When I informed a friend that

I need your opinion on the absurd topic of "legitimate rape." Does it make any sense to use the wording as a category for analysis in history or as what I call an analytic metaphor? I want to write a short essay on the antiquity of the concept (the Romans legitimately raped people and territories to create the Roman Empire) and its contemporary uses (American citizens are legitimately raped by political uses of disinformation or misinformation).

he replied

The definition of rape has evolved over the centuries. As you state the Romans, and earlier civilizations did not consider what they did as "rape" by the traditional definition. It was an act of power, pillage and empire building. Much has to do with the position of women as subservient, "baby makers" and sexual objects historically. Also recall that under Greece and Rome, soldiers had young male escorts that accompanied them for sexual purposes that one could define as having been "raped" regardless of how Akin used this in reference to pregnancy and abortion. The entire concept is much broader and complicated than what the media has superficially attributed to (an ignorant Republican…--you get my drift). I think your inclusion of the political use of the term "rape" is right on and again reinforces the multiple uses and realistic definition outside of a violent sexual act against one’s consent. I recall a picture of a woman protesting the government and taxes. She held a sign that said something to the effect that "I don't have to worry about a sex life, the government fucks (i. e. rapes) me everyday...”

 

It is obvious, as my friend added in a later email, that “legitimate rape” as an analytic metaphor can indeed reveal much about “an historical continuum” that extends from such literary works as “The Epic of Gilgamesh” and the Homeric epics to aesthetic treatments of rape in the visual arts to  the political histories of the  Japanese rape of Nanjing and the recent and very costly rape of Iraq and to the contemporary  neo-colonial rape of the continent of Africa that must be studied in depth in the realm of the post-colonial.  In her forthcoming book, Policing the Womb: The New Cultural Politics of Reproduction (Cambridge University Press), Michele Goodwin promises to enlighten us, by using empirical evidence, about the “political and regulatory discourse on women’s reproduction.”  Nevertheless, something more is needed.   Akin’s opening of Pandora’s box warrants our giving literary and cultural attention to how the symbolic discourses of female and male bodies describe and indict what is after all these centuries still primitive in world civilizations. Perhaps when I do write “An Absurd Essay on the Absurdity of Legitimate Rape,” I shall be compelled to suggest : human beings still pray to an unknown God as John Donne did in Holy Sonnet 14 (1633)

Take me to You, imprison me, for I,

Except You’enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                            PHBW BLOG     November 24, 2012

 

A New Novel

T. Geronimo Johnson - HOLD IT ‘TIL IT HURTS

• Author Event

Start: 09/20/2012 6:00 pm

“The magnificence of Hold It ‘Til It Hurts is not only in the prose and the story but also in the book's great big beating heart. These complex and compelling characters and the wizardry of Johnson’s storytelling will dazzle and move you from first page to last.”
—ANTHONY SWOFFORD, author of JARHEAD

Please join us for a reading and signing with T. Geronimo Johnson featuring his riveting debut novel, HOLD IT ‘TIL IT HURTS.
Johnson is from New Orleans originally and although he now makes his home in Berkeley, he maintains a strong connection to his hometown - and New Orleans figures prominently in the novel. Hold It ‘Til It Hurts is one of the few literary takes on the war in Afghanistan and the veterans who served there. The plot centers around Achilles Conroy and his brother, Troy, whose white adoptive parents decide to provide them with their adoption papers upon their return from serving in the war. After Troy disappears, Achilles—always his brother’s keeper—embarks on a harrowing journey in search of his brother amid the chaos of Hurricane Katrina.
It’s an intense modern day epic, and acts as a starting point for discussions on everything from transracial adoption to contemporary war narratives to portrayals of Hurricane Katrina. National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon recently called it “a novel about war that goes in search of passionate love, a dreamy thriller, a sprawling mystery, a classical quest for a lost brother in which the shadowy quarry is clearly the seeker’s own self, and a meditation on family and racial identity that makes its forerunners in American fiction look innocent by comparison.” And Publishers Weekly has called it a “powerful, stylish debut novel.”

Born in New Orleans, T. Geronimo Johnson received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’Workshop and has taught writing and held fellowships—including a Stegner Fellowship and an Iowa Arts Fellowship—at ASU, Iowa, Berkeley, and Stanford. His writing has appeared in Best New American Voices, the Indiana Review, the LA Review, and Illuminations, among others. He has worked on, at, or in brokerages, kitchens, construction sites, phone rooms, education non-profits, writing centers, summer camps, ladies’ shoe stores, nightclubs, law firms, offset print shops, and San Quentin. He is also a Niroga certified yoga instructor and trained rally driver. This is his first novel.

What I Say to My Friends Behind the Scenes

Dear Maryemma and Howard,

The ideas we have been exchanging do much to inform the "internal" agenda for PHBW, the things we can actually accomplish. Our "external" agenda has to do with that vast space of topics in African American literature and culture that other scholars must tackle. One typical external agenda item is illustrated by all the information Rose Anne Gentry has shared with us about her husband and now about Bill Hutson. A small portion of that information can be used in shaping some narrative about Allen Polite as a poet in exile, and it is to be supplemented with information from Michael McEachrone. The rest properly belongs to inquiry about the lives in exile mainly of visual artists, to inquiry we can suggest should be pursued. Our field is immense. We must know the limits of the intellectual burdens we can bear. Otherwise, we shall collapse upon ourselves. There is unfinished work enough in the PHBW inventory; for example, who will write about the three self-published novels of John Hatch?

Through the NEH Institute, we shall contribute to the study and teaching of poetry. After the Institute, the continuation of that effort is to be shared by Furious Flower with some assistance from PHBW. Exploration of popular culture, Funk, music and performance depends on where Tony Bolden takes it. Again, PHBW will provide some assistance, but we can not take the lead.

As far as Kenneth Warren's "pushing us to take a stand and name what we are doing as different from before" goes, PHBW (by way of the three of us) is an ideal model. Let us not forget that our PROJECT does as much as several professional organizations and author societies to push difference. Let me itemize.

A: MARYEMMA ---PHBW itself, 30 years of continuing effort to link teaching, scholarship and criticism, scholars and students from many generations, special attention to Hughes, Morrison, and Wright, the nurturing of graduate and undergraduate students in ways I doubt they are nurtured at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. If we need more difference, it shall come by way of stronger insistance that graduate students practice DISCIPLINE in terms of 1) work ethic and 2) acquistion of knowledge about the professional contures of their chosen topics. The practice of discipline, if these students are at all attentive, complements INNOVATION, which is maximum use of imagination, critical thought, skills in mastering emerging technologies and in critiquing those technologies, and developing their independent networks with peers in social sciences and hard sciences ---these networks are absolutley necessary for a future. The process that is PHBW makes very clear why awareness of history of the OLD helps one to avoid, as much as is humanly possible, the unknown and unpredictable traps of the NEW.

B: HOWARD ---How does one teach Afrofuturism? The work at SIUE concentrates on documentation, discovery of patterns in literary and cultural territories, ways of teaching poetry and fiction through very imaginative, collaborative exercises with students, actual use of digital humanities and new media technologies, and taking forward what Alondra Nelson's Afrofuturism unveiled about technology and new directions. Howard's work on book covers sketched out a new methodology for talking about literary politics, reputation, and reader reception. If that important methodology has been lost in the shuffle, the dance of the digital, it may be good for PHBW to bring it to the foreground yet once more. In the age of minute attention-spans things have to be repeated and repeated and repeated. Another strength is Howard's willingness to disclose, to acknowledge, to share, to make collaboration with his peers and his elders more real that the fashionable lip-service that condemns the humanities. Let us take this as a beacon for behavior within PHBW.

C: JERRY --The key is the pre-future stance, the effort to unite the OLD and the NEW in a free space of sharing (mainly blogs) and focused work in China: the effort to help Chinese colleagues and students to know and to understand more about African American literature, an effort of international exchange. The pre-future makes trouble and cultivates irony and retreats from the temptations of correctness and popularity. Damn correctness when one major problem is dealing with the undeniable vanishing of the once potent myth of "the black community" which gave credibility to saying one's work was for one's people. There is no unified "black community" to address, although small "black communities of interest" abound. I sincerely doubt that young scholars think they have any obligation to do anything for any people other than themselves and a few of their friends. SO BE IT. Thus, I resist the loss of memory, the loss of sense of responsibility, by being the lone and mysterious voice in the wasteland, the voice addressing colorblind air, the voice that says HISTORY (the making of narratives of the past) IS ALWAYS IMPORTANT. My voice tries to say that the humanities has participated in its own future demise by ignoring opportunities to have dialogues with other disciplines, by pretending to be ignorant that the worlds of business, economics, the sciences, and applied technologies all think the humanities is a cosmic joke, a body of nonsense to be dismissed as a small nuisance. I seek to reaffirm common sense by sticking needles in balloons. DOUBT EVERYTHING AND BE JOYFUL WHEN ONE'S DOUBT IS PROVEN TO BE WRONG!!!

The three of us complement each other in very positive ways.

I do not think Dana Williams will get far with breathing life into CLA without the help of young scholars. The young scholars will have to decide that CLA is a forum wherein they can be mentored. If they do not make that decision, CLA will become a noble fossil in the history of our profession.

I also think the MLA Division of Black American Literature and Culture has no discernible or public agenda. It seems so oblivious to knowing why Darwin T. Turner worked tirelessly for its formation. In the last five years, I can think of nothing that the Division has done as a Division to enrich the field, to participate in MLA's Options for Teaching series or any other initiatives within MLA. Yes, individual members have done a lot, but the Division is quite an invisible body.

Peace,

Jerry

mathematics and humanity

October 16, 2012

Mathematics and What It Means to Be Human, Part 2

Michele Osherow

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Michele Osherow

By Michele Osherow and Manil Suri

In May 2009, Michele Osherow, an English professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and resident dramaturg at the Folger Theatre, in Washington, invited her colleague Manil Suri, a mathematician at the university, to act as mathematics consultant for the Folger's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The play explores the relationship between past and present through the characters' intellectual pursuits, poetic and mathematical.That led to a series of "show and tell" sessions explaining the mathematics behind the play both to cast members and audiences. In the fall of 2011, the two professors decided to take their collaboration to the classroom and jointly teach a freshman seminar on "Mathematics and What It Means to be Human." Here is the second of a three-part series on how the experiment played out. Part 1 is here.
Michele Osherow: While Manil astounded the students with mathematical impossibilities—the trisection of an angle assignment, Zeno's paradox—I focused on the possibilities that characterized the study of literature. Shakespeare's King Lear made it easy to note the range of readings inspired by a single work. But not every text we gave to the students was as richly complex as Lear.
In fact, convoluted might better describe the poetry we introduced next in the classroom from a collection called the Oulipo Compendium. Oulipo poetry emerged in 1960 when Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais gathered a group of writers and mathematicians in France to create literature guided by strict (very strict) and often bizarre constraints. For example, the S+7 (or N+7) constraint requires that every noun in a text be replaced with the seventh noun appearing after it in a dictionary. (You can find more information about Oulipo poetry here.)
I had never heard the word Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature) and was surprised when Manil handed me the anthology during our course planning. He qualified the suggestion by saying he had "no idea if it was any good." But I was intrigued: Literature produced through a series of strict constraints was an interesting fusion of our two fields. I wasn't sure, though, if the art was to be found in the language or in the template. I worried that to some students it wouldn't matter.
When I began reading the material I told myself it was probably more compelling in French. Mostly, I thought the Oulipo pieces were sometimes clever, but more often bizarre outcomes of linguistic games. There are some impressive names among the Oulipians (including Italo Calvino), however, and we decided to let the class have at it. I saw it as an opportunity to introduce students to postmodernism, and give them a chance to think and write creatively. Though I dreaded that they would love the stuff.
It felt strange calling the selections we examined "poetry." I couldn't pull much meaning from the works, and neither could the students, which lead to a discussion of the ways in which meaning might be determined by a reader's will. Somehow, though, the more time we spent examining Oulipian patterns, the more compelling I found the game. I liked these poets' sense of humor and their intolerance of pretentious artists and academics alike. Plus, I appreciated their name—the word potentielle seemed so compelling, and forgiving. Could we brand our class a seminaire potentiel?

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Manil Suri

Manil Suri

Manil Suri: It had seemed like a plausible item for the syllabus, but delving deeper made me realize just how pseudo-mathematical (not to mention pseudo-literary) Oulipo was. At one point, I asked Michele if it was OK to use the term "mental masturbation" in a humanities class—words I'd never found an appropriate occasion to deploy in 28 years of teaching. She said yes, so I did, to only a stray titter (my math students would probably have been more shocked).
Fortunately, Oulipo did lead to some good dialogue. The fact that the anthology opened with a grandiose manifesto of qualifying rules (surely an unpromising sign for any literary work, even if partially tongue-in-cheek) paved the way to explore the axiomatic foundations of math. One reading was an English translation of the fantastically ambitious (at least in title) Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. It's a set of 10 sonnets, from which new poems can be formed by choosing the first line from the first line of any of the 10 poems, the second line from the second lines of the 10 poems, and so on. The only problem is the new poems don't necessarily make sense.
Our reading led to a discussion of permutations and combinations. That was my cue to point out that each poem in Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes could be identified by a unique 14-digit number (specifying the source poem for each line). Given our society's obsession with quantification, I asked the students, would we eventually find a means to reduce all literature this way? The class didn't believe so, at least based on what Oulipo had to offer.
But Michele rose to the movement's defense, striking upon the correct word to capture the link between mathematics and Oulipo: At their core, they were both games. Once we arrived at that insight, the class dove in. The students' creativity blossomed when we told them to come up with their own Oulipian constraint and then create a work based on it. Some formulated their constraints based on an Ipod's shuffling, others on hair braiding, or language overheard in a cafe. One even constructed a poem using the time-signature function of a metronome.
Michele: The students' forced poetic labor with Oulipo inspired them to tackle more challenging works. We examined poems specifically on or referencing mathematical topics, such as Blake's "Tyger," Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet on Euclid, Howard Moss's "Particular Beauties."
I found myself jazzed by the poets' playfulness and investigations of mathematical concepts. My colleague? Not so much. It was during a discussion of Moss's poem that I saw an alarmed look sweep Manil's face—a look that erupted into the lamentation, "I'm drowning in a sea of metaphor!" It was the lack of precision, the seemingly endless array of meanings, that frustrated Manil. He was at his most earnest that day and I welcomed it, although I was surprised to hear an accusation of imprecision leveled at poetry, in particular.
But I knew enough by that point to see that the precision to which he was accustomed was different from that found in the humanities. There is precision in poetry—in its crafting and in its comprehension—but interpretations are not limited to a single, most correct reading.
It was easy to concede that Manil was right about one thing: These poets were playing fast and loose with mathematical concepts and were not conveying the full complexity of constructs like Zeno's paradox (in Moss's "Particular Beauties"). But then that wasn't their job, I protested. The task of poets is to use those things available to them in order to share observations about the world.
I think the students liked those days when Manil and I went at it. I liked those moments, too, because I not only had to confront another perspective head on but also had to challenge my own. I loved seeing the baffled expressions of the students while their instructors disagreed; the things we were asking them to consider were perplexing and appropriate.
Manil: I like to think I'm cognizant of the precision needed in literary construction, being a writer myself (there—I've played it—my trump card of having dabbled in different disciplines; the academic equivalent of the sensitive male).
But yes, I found it difficult to sit still as meticulous mathematical principles were divested of their integrity in the service of poetic cleverness. Mathematics is so poorly understood as it is, by poets and readers alike. To further confuse its meaning in swirls of willful metaphor seemed a dubious pursuit. (I suppose I must have come off as a grumpy party-pooper—probably still do.)
As for more general accusations, I wasn't knowledgeable enough about the humanities' goals and methodologies to make a comparison with those of mathematics. Perhaps there'd be a chance later for a no-holds-barred thrashing out. Which would be invigorating and instructive, even with odds against me of 14-to-1.
But onward with our story. Freshly spewed out by the sea of metaphor, I led the class to hopefully firmer ground: a field trip to Baltimore's Walters Art Museum for a perfectly timed exhibition on a recently rediscovered palimpsest that recorded several discoveries by Archimedes (including an understanding of infinity and aspects of calculus).
The poster for the exhibition, "Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes," showed much mathematical promise: geometrical figures floating in space seemed to be the clear stars of the show. Except the exhibit turned out to be mostly about the conservation techniques used to decipher this and other manuscripts.
While Michele lingered lovingly over each panel, I gnashed my teeth in bitterness (but discreetly, so as not to alarm the students). Mathematics was a clear afterthought, relegated to some modest exhibits in the final gallery. Another opportunity to make the subject come alive was lost. The New York Times reviewer complained about this, as did (a bright spot!) some of our freshmen.
Toward the end of the visit, though, was a sight to warm the cockles of even the coldest mathematician heart. On a low-set table was Archimedes' famous "Stomachion" jigsaw, where visitors were invited to assemble 14 irregular pieces of colored felt into a square (something that could be done in 17,152 different ways). Students from our class were trying to solve the puzzle jointly with math majors we had invited along. Michele and I watched the collaborative effort as proudly as doting parents. Maybe there was hope, maybe the twain could meet after all.
Michele: We carried that hope into the final unit for the course, one devoted both to fractals and to the Tom Stoppard play, Arcadia, that first caused me to seek out Manil as a mathematics consultant for the Folger production.
I felt optimistic about the upcoming lessons: This was, after all, the text that prompted my collaboration with my unlikely (I nearly wrote unlucky) co-instructor. I hoped the students would be as fired up as we were by Stoppard's smarts, and by the connections he makes between mathematics and literature. I hoped they would appreciate the layering of time, ideas, and relationships; I hoped they'd dispute the penicillin versus poetry binary.
It was easy for me to forget, blinded by love, that Arcadia is a difficult read, especially for freshmen who hadn't been exposed previously to a staging of the play, or to Stoppard (true genius, but dense reading). They needed more hand-holding with the play than they did with Lear; they were confused by the shifting time periods and even by the humor. There was much historical and ideological ground to cover—the transition from Enlightened to Romantic thought, the role of knowledge and landscape. They didn't understand iterated algorithms or the play's ending. We needed another semester.
But we also needed closure. It was that time when the students were expected to see the connections we'd been hunting throughout the term. I took them back to where we had started, the search for patterns, and we went through the play looking for patterns of thought, situation, and language. The students could do that well but also had a good eye for the differences among the repeated patterns.
"Right!" I said, "Does that mean they're 'iterated?' Is the play a kind of literary fractal?"
Manil: And there we have it, a question that crystallizes the conflicts in this course—and perhaps in the interaction of art and mathematics in general. A fractal is a precise mathematical entity, one with infinite levels of self-similarity, and moreover, possessing a fractional dimension (e.g., neither a one-dimensional line nor a two-dimensional patch, but something cloudlike that lives in between).
Mathematical training insists such definitions be rigorously observed. If they're not, everything that follows can collapse like a house of cards. Clearly, such an attitude would be downright Talibanistic for a course like this one. And yet, to make analogies, to bandy about technical terms, or to employ them in art, one needs to achieve a certain level of understanding first.
Which, alas, does not come easy. Bringing the class to a point where they could discuss the play in terms of fractals had taken work. It was a definite accomplishment (fortunately, we could use the animations I had prepared for the Folger production of the play).
Did the students have more than a hazy idea of fractional dimension? Of course not. And neither would most math majors without a course on the topic. But we fortunately didn't need to go that deep, just like my understanding about Romantic versus Classicist garden design in Stoppard's play (something I'm still indignant at him for expecting me to be familiar with) remains cursory. What Arcadia does is invite you to expand your horizons, offering tantalizing glimpses of interlinked worlds waiting to be explored. The extent to which you journey into them, the work you put in, the connections you forge with what is familiar to you, have to be your own. In hindsight, that was perhaps the main message of our course.
The last thing we did with Arcadia was read aloud an excerpt from it—the diatribe that Bernard, the literary don, aims at the mathematician Valentine: "Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need."
It was the perfect juncture to loop back to C.P. Snow, whose famous "Two Cultures" essay about the divide in Western intellectual thought between the sciences and the humanities we had discussed at the beginning of the course. The class still saw the divide, still saw the long road ahead.
But perhaps the students were more optimistic than Snow (or Bernard). They'd now glimpsed the future: the digitalization of the humanities, the emphasis on statistical and quantified evidence, the interconnectedness of human experience. The next phase, their individual projects, would reveal whether the corner had been turned.
Next week: The students strike back!

Michele Osherow is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and resident dramaturg for the Folger Theatre in Washington. Manil Suri is a professor of mathematics and statistics at the university, and author of the novels "The Death of Vishnu" and "The Age of Shiva." His forthcoming novel is "The City of Devi."

Writing Letters

The Art of Letter Writing

by Brett & Kate McKay on April 16, 2009 · 62 comments

in Manly Skills

In the days of cell phones, email, and text messages, letter writing can seem hopelessly outdated. But it’s an art worth bringing back, and not because of some misplaced sense of nostalgia either. The writing and reception of letters will always offer an experience that modern technology cannot touch. Twitter is effective for broadcasting what you’re eating for lunch, and email is fantastic for quick exchanges on the most pertinent pieces of information. But when it comes to sharing one’s true thoughts, sincere sympathies, ardent love, and deepest gratitude, words traveling along an invisible superhighway will never suffice. Why?
Because sending a letter is the next best thing to showing up personally at someone’s door. Ink from your pen touches the stationary, your fingers touch the paper, your saliva seals the envelope. Something tangible from your world travels through machines and hands, and deposits itself in another’s mailbox. Your letter is then carried inside as an invited guest. The paper that was sitting on your desk, now sits on another’s. The recipient handles the paper that you handled. Letters create a connection that modern, impersonal forms of communication will never approach.

For two years before we were married, Kate and I were a thousand miles apart, with letter-writing our only available means of communication. We fell in love over the dozens of letters sent between us. I do not know of a richer and more satisfying way of getting to know a person. Today the collection of letters from that time is one of our most treasured possessions, something we hope our kids will read and get a kick out of. Thus, letters not only serve a purpose in the here and now, they also stand as historical records, giving us a incomparable window into the past. Anyone who has ever come across the old letters of parents and grandparents and suddenly felt transported back to another time and place, knows well the legacy-leaving power of letters. What will we leave our grandchildren? The username and password to our email accounts?

Photo by Chantal

Now is the time to strike up a correspondence with your friends and lovers. I do not know a single person whose countenance does not light up at the sight of a real letter in their mailbox. So many of us, myself included, look forward to getting the mail each day, even though the majority of the time it’s simply a pile of catalogs and bills. The desire for real correspondence clearly hasn’t left us. But if you want a letter, you have to send a letter. It’s up to you take the initiative and begin the circle of communication.
Snail mail has fallen out of favor of late, and many men may understandably need a refresher on its practice. Today begins a series of letter writing articles that will appear on the Art of Manliness. We will cover everything from the selection of stationery to the how to’s concerning the writing of specific letters such as those expressing sympathy and congratulations. Today, we present a simple overview on letter writing.

Supplies Needed

If you’re going to become a letter-writing artist, you’re going to need to acquire the tools of the trade. Getting handsome stationery and high quality writing implements will make practicing your craft all the more enjoyable. We’ll be covering each of things in-depth later on, but here is a brief overview of what you’ll need:
Stationery

In the art of letter-writing, stationery is your canvas. You’ll want to purchase stationery in a few different sizes for letters and notes of various lengths. Always keep your stationery simple and distinguished.
Fountain Pen

Image by Linda Cronin

Using a fountain pen requires a bit of practice and finesse, but provides several benefits. The writing from a fountain pen adds a subtle hint of sophistication and class that’s hard to get from a 20 cent Bic ballpoint. And instead of having to endlessly press down on the paper, you glide a fountain pen across the page, allowing you to write for hours without tiring your hand.
Wax and Seal

Image by Eli the Bearded

The tradition of sealing one’s correspondence with a wax seal is one with royal roots. Kings and dignitaries applied the seal to ensure their letters were opened only by the intended recipient and to certify who had written it. These days, they just look dang cool and give you a chance to play with fire.
Letter Opener

Image by Living Studios

Once you start sending letters, you’ll begin getting them back as well. Nothing is more annoying then trying to tear open a well-stuck envelope with your paws, so get a nice letter opener to do the job right. My grandpa had one that looked like a little sword, and I thought that was pretty sweet as a kid.

The Art of Letter Writing

What follows is a brief overview of letter writing, taken from Hills Manual of Social and Business Forms. This 1821 publication, has, as we have previously discussed, advice that is as fresh today as it was a hundred years ago. We turn now to Professor Thomas Hill for a primer on the basic ins and outs of letter writing:
You have thoughts that you wish to communicate to another through the medium of a letter. Possibly you have a favor to bestow. Quite as likely you have a favor to ask. In either case you wish to write that letter in a manner such as to secure the respect and consideration of the person with whom you correspond.
The rules for the mechanical execution of a letter are few ; understanding and observing the rules already considered for composition, the writer has only to study perfect naturalness of expression, to write a letter well.

Style and Manner

The expression of language should, as nearly as possible, be the same as the writer would speak. A letter is but a talk on paper. The style of writing will depend upon the terms of intimacy existing between the parties. If to a superior, it should be respectful ; to inferiors, courteous ; to friends, familiar ; to relatives, affectionate.

Originality

Do not be guilty of using that stereotyped phrase,
Dear Friend:
I now take my pen in hand to let you know that I am well, and hope you are enjoying the same great blessing.
Be original. You are not exactly like any one else. Your letter should be a representative of yourself, not of anybody else. The world is full of imitators in literature, who pass on, leaving no reputation behind them. Occasionally originals come up, and fame and fortune are ready to do them service. The distinguished writers of the past and present have gone aside from the beaten paths. Letter writing affords a fine opportunity for the display of originality. In your letter be yourself ; write as you would talk.

Purity of Expression

Bear in mind the importance, in your correspondence, of using always the most chaste and beautiful language it is possible to command, consistent with ease and naturalness of expression. Especially in the long letters of friendship and love – those missives that reveal the heart-the language should show that the heart is pure. Let your letter be the record of the fancies and mood of the hour; the reflex of your aspirations, your joys, your disappointments; the faithful daguerreotype of your intellectuality and your moral worth.
You little dream how much that letter may influence your future. How much it may give of hope and happiness to the one receiving it. How much it may be examined, thought of, laughed over and commented on; and when you suppose it has long since been destroyed, it may be brought forth, placed in type, and published broadcast to millions of readers.
When, in after years, the letter you now write is given to the world, will there be a word, an expression, in the same that you would blush to see in print?
Write in the spirit of cheerfulness. It is unkind to the correspondent to fill the sheet with petty complainings, though there are occasions when the heart filled with grief may confide all its troubles and sorrows to the near friend, and receive in return a letter of sympathy and condolence, containing all the consolation it is possible for the written missive to convey.
The length of letters will depend upon circumstances. As a rule, however, business letters should be short, containing just what is necessary to be said, and no more.

Form

To be written correctly according to general usage, a letter will embrace the following parts:
1st, the date
2nd, complimentary address
3rd, body of the letter
4th, complimentary closing
5th signature
6th, superscription
Position of the Various Parts.

Etiquette of Letter Writing

As a rule, every letter, unless insulting in its character, requires an answer. To neglect to answer a letter, when written to, is as uncivil as to neglect to reply when spoken to. In the reply, acknowledge first the receipt of the letter, mentioning its date, and afterwards consider all the points requiring attention.
If the letter is to be very brief, commence sufficiently far from the top of the page to give a nearly equal amount of blank paper at the bottom of the sheet when the letter is ended.
In writing a letter, the answer to which is of more benefit to yourself than the person to whom you write, enclose a postage stamp for the reply.
Letters should be as free from erasures, interlineations, blots and postscripts as possible. It is decidedly better to copy the letter than to have these appear.

Related Posts

1. The Art of Letter Writing: Stationery
2. The Art of Letter Writing: The Sympathy Note
3. 30 Days to a Better Man Day 14: Write a Letter to Your Father
4. 30 Days to a Better Man Day 28: Write a Love Letter

Our Poets are Our Dangerous Friends

 

Our poets do many beneficial things for our commonweal.  They teach in public schools, in colleges and universities, in alternative education programs, in community centers and churches and sites of ill-repute.  When they feel generous, they call our attention to the works of other poets, to the writings of novelists, essayists, hard and soft scientists, and dramatists.  When they feel bitter and small, they call attention only to their egos.

They ---  Dudley Randall, Naomi Long Madgett, Margaret T. Burroughs, Margaret Walker, Ishmael Reed, Lenard D. Moore, Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady,  Haki Madhubuti  ---build institutions of great importance in our cultural lives ---Broadside Press, Lotus Press, DuSable Museum, the Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African American Experience,  I. Reed Books, the North Carolina Collective African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem Foundation,  Third World Press.

They --- Al Young,  Gwendolyn Brooks, Lance Jeffers, Ntozake Shange, Angela Jackson, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Sapphire, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed,  Sherley Anne Williams, Gayl Jones  --- write novels.

They  ---  Kalamu ya Salaam, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers,  and E. Ethelbert Miller  --create and maintain list-serves, websites, and blogspots.

They  ---  Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed,  Clarence Major,  Camille T. Dungy, James Weldon Johnson, Larry Neal, Kevin Powell, Sterling Brown, Mari Evans, Dudley Randall,  Tony Medina, Arna Bontemps, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez,  Michael Harper, June Jordan, Kevin Young, Louis Reyes Rivera, Rita Dove, Kwame Dawes, E. Ethelbert Miller  ---  edit noteworthy anthologies.

They  ---  Eugene B. Redmond, Alvin Aubert, Rudolph Lewis, C. Liegh McInnis ---  found and publish magazines   --- Drumvoices Revue, OBSIDIAN,  ChickenBones, Black Magnolias.

They  ---  Audre Lorde , Lorenzo Thomas, Kalamu ya Salaam, LeRoi Jones[ Amiri Baraka],  Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Nathaniel Mackey,  Eugene B. Redmond, Maya Angelou, Margaret Walker, Jean Toomer,  Harryette Mullen , Bob Kaufman ---  write touchstone books  --- Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Extraordinary Measures, What Is Life?, Blues People, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Liberating Voices, Discrepant Engagement, Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Jubilee, Cane, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews, Golden Sardine.

Our poets are our dangerous friends who give eyesight to the blind.

Ishmael Reed and Verbal War

ISHMAEL REED AND THE AMERICAN WAR OF WORDS

The October 3 presidential debate was a capital example of America’s war of words and visualized rhetoric.  The spectacle was ulotrichy.  Viewers are still at a loss to determine whether either debater said anything substantive regarding the economy, health care, the role of government, or a philosophy of governing.

Things would have been different and clearer had Ishmael Reed rather than James Charles Lehrer been the debate moderator.  Reed would not have stayed out of the flow.  He would have directed the debaters into the superdome of history.  Unlike Lehrer, Reed understands that a presidential debate is predicated on America’s social and racial contract and that one dividend of this contract is our nation’s contemporary nervous breakdown.

Reed opens his most recent collection of writing, Going Too Far: Essays about America’s Nervous Breakdown (Baraka Books 2012), with two sentences that fundamentally establish his locus in the history of black writing:

When they tell me “don’t go there” that’s my signal to navigate the forbidden topics of American life.  Just as the ex-slaves were able to challenge the prevailing attitudes about race in the United States after arriving in Canada, I am able to argue from Quebec against ordained opinion that paints the United States as a place where the old sins of racism have been vanquished and that those who insist that much work remains to be done are involved in “Old Fights,” as one of my young critics, John McWhorter, claims in articles in Commentary and The New Republic, where I am dismissed as an out of touch “fading anachronism.”

Reed is not an anachronism.  He is a pre-future sage.

Trillions of words have been spent in shaping and mapping the American mindscape since 1492.  Reed’s sustained efforts to keep us somewhat honest about that fact have been commendable.  His fictions, poems, plays, and recordings are a moral looking glass for envisioning what we might be.  His nonfiction, however, is at once testimony and indictment of what we are.

Reed turns 75 in 2013, and now is the time to give dedicated attention to his writing, anthologizing, and selfless work in publishing the multicultural/multiethnic writing of others. Special inquiries should be made about his nonfiction:  Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978), God Made Alaska for the Indians (1982), Writin’ is Fightin’ (1988), Airing Dirty Laundry (1993), Blues City: A Walk in Oakland (2003), Mixing It Up (2008), Another Day at the Front (2003), Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers (2010), and Going Too Far.  Fame has given Reed a few rewards, but the reward he most deserves is knowing, within his lifetime, that his uncanny intellect succeeded in making people a bit more honest.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.  October 6, 2012                            

Kalamu ya Salaam, Keropetse Kgositsile, and Jerry Ward, April 2012

THRALL

Natasha Trethewey and the Eyes of Historical/Poetic Consciousness

In Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), an aptly titled collection, Trethewey makes a partial analysis of bondage.  Unlike their synonym “slavery,” thrall and bondage provoke images of the exotic, the gendered perversity we can easily confuse with “love,” and what is plainly erotic.  Trethewey is extending the work begun in her second collection Bellocq’s Ophelia and placing greater stress on ekphrasis, the literary commentary on the visual image as text.  The emphasis in Belocq’s Ophelia was on use of the persona and restoration of voice to the visual silence of invasive photography.  Thrall directs attention away from such intimacy and toward the more blatant uses in painting of visual classification, particularly in the casta paintings of Juan Rodríguez Juárez and other artists fascinated by the body, the racialized evidence of the social constructions of biology. Ekphrasis is not exactly rare in poetry, and in African American poetry its touchstone is Clarence Major’s masterpiece “The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage,” a redoubling painterly text which Linda Ferguson Selzer brilliantly explicated in African American Review.  One might gain much from reading Trethewey’s poems in tandem with rather than in gendered opposition to Major’s experiment with historical/poetic consciousness.

Aware of how verbal imagery has special manipulative power in lyric and narrative poetry, one is obliged to give regard Trethewey’s use of reversed ekphrasis in those poems in Thrall that concern her historical relationship with her poet father Eric Trethewey. The final stanza of “Enlightenment” (71) is a devastating and haunting self-interpretation of Thrall as a book and thrall as a category of human experience:

I’ve made a joke of it, this history

        that links us ---white father, black daughter ---

even as it renders us other to each other.

Trethewey plainly “outs” the black humor of history blackly.  And the grand question to which one may choose to respond is “Why should we have just this kind of poetry at just this point in the early years of the twenty-first century?

One might make some progress toward an answer from reading Arthé A. Anthony’s Picturing Black New Orleans: A Creole Photographer’s View of the Early Twentieth Century (University Press of Florida, 2012), a study of Florestine Perrault Collins, a woman who learned photographic techniques while passing for white.  Despite change, much in the United States is constant: all of us are held in thrall by someone’s camera lens, by someone’s paint brush, by someone’s hegemonic eye.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 1, 2012                                                                                                PHBW BLOG

A Novel by Tao Lin

An Asian American Concession

 

                If Tao Lin is “a new literary voice to watch, and reckon with,” there is little to see and less to reckon with.  The notion of watching a voice is a signal of 21^st century taste, of the failure of many contemporary critics to ponder their reasons for glorifying trash.  You have to give Tao Lin credit for exploiting the malaise that infects contemporary American literature and for pandering to readers who are passively paranoid, easily gulled by the hypertextuality of minimalist experimental writing.  In this sense, Lin’s novel Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007) is a cheap fix.  You have to give Lin credit also for understanding, in ways only the very young can understand, how American society progressively devalues its cultural capital. He knows that you can’t expect better in a society that wears an aura of self-deception.  A society that worships a god who is only green paper. Why try?

                Lin’s novel is a generous toilet into which he dumps the pure products of the WASP imagination:

David Lynch films, Honda Civic, Denny’s, Batman, Domino’s Pizza, Wal-Mart, Lucky Charms, Cheerios, MTV, Mel Gibson, Target, Kmart,  Schopenhauer, Jean Rhys, Spiderman, SUV, Braveheart and Mulholland Drive, a president who utters what everybody already knows ----“Politics is a pretend game where it is very important to block out the information that it is a pretend game”(195).

After you finish reading Lin’s novel, flush the toilet.

                Flushing the toilet accomplishes little more than the sound of rushing water, but you feel better for having given sound to the silence of this ethnic American novel.  Lin does not have to underline the Asian presence you find in fiction by Amy Tan and Gish Jen.  That presence is announced by the fact that the most intelligent characters in the novel are a bear, a dolphin, and a moose.  The signifying monkey of Lin’s imagination speaks his mind.

                Born in 1983, Lin belongs to a generation of writers who create under the influence of hip hop, a generation programmed and predisposed to make cynical critiques of post-everything.  Their literature of exhaustion secures a fragile referentiality in a gumbo of brand names and clichés, seasoned with a few grains of cultural literacy.  The exceptions are works that avoid the potholes of pretend naturalism and realism by walking along the pathways of speculative fiction and by pulling up the primordial roots of story.  Lin is young.  If he is smart and more than tendentiously witty, he will recognize what a dead end the aesthetics of trash is.  He has begun his journey to what from the perspective of Asia is the Far East.  If he is smart and a genuine writer, he will recognize the gift ethnic American literatures can make to the republic of letters in the United States.  Eeeee Eee Eeee is exotic wrapping paper, an Asian American concession looking for a box to decorate.

Jeremiah Ramcat

September 8, 2012

An Alpha Phi Alpha Act of Reading

 

August 21, 2012

 

TOWARD FULLER DISCLOSURE

 

                When you read such autobiographical writing as W. E. B. DuBois’ Dusk of Dawn (1940), Ja A. Jahannes’ WordSong Poet: A Memoir Anthology (2011),an innovative variant,  or Thelma V. Reed’s Black Girl from Tannery Flats (2003), you accept an invitation. On the other hand, you and the biographers are collaborating intruders when you navigate the pages of Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (1962) by Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely or John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism (2010) by Keith Gilyard.  What, however, do you say about the act of reading

Long, Michael G., ed. Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

The mediated invitation to intrude is somewhat different in this case. Not only does the book bear Derrick Bell’s authenticating Foreword, but it incorporates necessary orchestration by Michael Long.  Your option is to read through Bell and Long, to go to the heart of Thurgood Marshall’s letters from 1934 to 1957 and to discover overlooked portions of civil rights history.

                It is often not noticed that African American writing encompasses more than African American literature.  Formal literary study valorizes a limited body of canonical works on aesthetic grounds, but cultural studies which attend to both writing and literature recognize the importance of letters as autobiographical acts.  Reading correspondence between Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes or between John A. Williams and Chester Himes enlarges our sense of literary politics and ideological contradictions.  Reading Thurgood Marshall’s letters expands our sense of the history of legal action and cultural practices in the United States.  As “texts,” his letters make new knowledge and unusual reading pleasures available to us.  Attention to African American writing enables us to discern why one of Michael Long’s potentially divisive rhetorical gestures is especially important.

                In his introduction to Marshalling Justice, Long compares Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr., compares a graduate of Lincoln University (PA) with a graduate of Morehouse College.

 

Commentators often state that the time was right for King to emerge as forcefully as he did, and King himself talked about the zeitgeist of history being far more important than his own role in galvanizing the civil rights movement. But what many of us fail to note is that the time was right exactly because Marshall had already pushed the clock ahead, sometimes single-handedly.  For twenty long years before King assumed leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Thurgood Marshall, the young NAACP attorney known to everyday blacks as “Mr. Civil Rights,” struggled day and night against racial discrimination and segregation in schools, transportation, the military, businesses, voting booths, courtrooms, and neighborhoods. (xvii)

 

Long, an everyday white, could not know, without having read Charles H. Wesley’s The History of Alpha Phi Alpha : A Development in College Life (Chicago: Foundation Publishers, 1959), that Marshall and King were Alpha men.  Everyday whites seldom know what a certain class of everyday blacks takes to be common knowledge. Marshall and King had taken a sacred vow to be first of all, servants of all, and to transcend all.  Their transcendence brings to the surface many things that the zeitgeist of America’s penchant for forgetting would have us leave buried.  Being myself an Alpha, I exhume what memory ought not allow us to forget.

                Marshall’s letters are models of good writing and of grace under extreme pressures, and his grace is not the self-serving kind famously broadcast by Ernest Hemingway.  These letters remind us of what human character is or can be; Marshall and King were brave men not saints.  My deliberately biased reading of Marshall’s letters enables me to see more clearly the human dimensions of America’s ongoing battles with race and civil rights.  In 1956, it was very appropriate that King received the Alpha Award of Honor in recognition of “Christian leadership in the cause of first-class citizenship for all mankind” and that Marshall got the Alpha Founder’s Award “for his contributions to constitutional law and citizenship”  (Wesley 556-557).  But brave men because they are men have feet of clay.  Marshall exposes some of his imperfections in his correspondence with the Federal Bureau of Investigation between 1955 and 1957.  Reading toward fuller disclosure is not always pleasant. It is always a matter of brutal discipline.

                When I need respite from this brutality, I find pleasure in what is absent in Marshall’s letters: commentary on his relations with his Alpha brothers.  Marshall had no need to comment.  The fraternal bonds were always already there in his work with Charles H. Houston (his most important mentor), Walter White, A. P. Tureaud, Frank DeCosta, Herman M. Sweatt, Arthur Shores, and Channing Tobias. When Marshall wrote to his wife in May 1940 that A. Maceo Smith (a figure of great importance in Texas civil rights history) “drove us over 400 miles yesterday in eight and a half hours,” he was commenting on services rendered by his Alpha brother.

                My pride in having fraternal association with Thurgood Marshall is innocent trivia.  What really counts are his letters as examples of literary excellence in African American writing and our gaining fuller disclosure from reading them;  Marshall’s bravery in the face of danger and his legacy to America; the splendid record of his life’s  work in civil and human rights, and his lifelong ability to “rabble.”  Thurgood Marshall was a righteous rebel and a king of the rabble at Lincoln University (PA). As Ja  A. Jahannes wrote in WordSong Poets ----

Perhaps the rabble is what prepared Thurgood Marshall (Class of 1930) with the argumentative skills to lead the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to victory against segregation in Brown vs. The Board of Education, or enabled him to become Solicitor General of the United States, and eventually Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Perhaps, too, it is in this milieu of verbal gymnastics of the rabble that the rich tradition of literary excellence sprang forth at Lincoln like truth-filled thunderstorms and ice-cold rain revelations, volcanic and whispered truths, and pulsating distillations of a world needing defining and refining (11-12)

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

               

April 4, 1997 document

 PHBW DOCUBLOG

April 4, 1997

Remarks for panel “Making Black Literary Anthologies: Past and Present” at University of Wisconsin-Madison symposium “Canonizing African American Literature: Black Anthologies in America 1843-1996”

                Memory, according to current thinking in neuroscience, can be talked about as long-term and short-term.  In light of the probability of having these two kinds of memory, we might consider The Poetry of the Negro (1949, 1974) edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps as an anthology designed for long-term memory.  On the other hand, Black Fire (1968) edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, which did not pretend to ideological neutrality was short-term.  Anthologies assist us in remembering and in forgetting.  They remain quite essential for the reconstruction of group memory, the architectural work that use pieces of the past to create for the present matter for remembering.  The forgotten aspects of literature never come forth as they were.  They come through the filter of distance, through the lens of the editor looking toward a future.  We editors have to worry about what we help people to remember and to forget.

                When I compiled Black Southern Voices (1992) with John Oliver Killens and Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997), the notion that I was participating in canon formation did not dance in my head.  If people want to see these two anthologies as part of a canon-making effort, they are welcome to do so.  Black Southern Voices is Mr. Killens’ anthology; it was his idea; I was called in to help, and completed the work after his death.  The anthology was shaped according to his ideas about the social responsibility of artistic voices, and I thank Keneth Kinnamon for saying this morning that the anthology gives credibility to the idea of regional difference.  The phrase “social responsibility of artistic voices” (open to multiple disputes and debates) is an accusing finger, eliciting dread among the clerics who have given up hair shirts for the comfort of cardinal red silk.  In a nutshell, Black Southern Voices casts some light on the South and the Black South, reminding us of the origins of oppositions, of where everyday opposition is real.  With all its imperfections, Black Southern Voices is there for discovery or rediscovery.  Perhaps it reminds us of the importance of attending to African American writing in opposition to a narrow attention to literature (as literature is variously defined), a subset of writing.

                Trouble the Water only deals with poetry.  I was always mindful in making the anthology of Eugene Redmond’s Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry.  Perhaps the anthology has a mission.  Perhaps it records a wondrous accident that black poetry addresses so many different audiences at any given time.  It reminds people of the rage and sweep and placidity of water, the ineluctable necessity of water.  Thus, its title.

                As I mentioned to William Andrews yesterday, there is a secret design in this anthology, a call and response pattern based not on textuality or intertexuality so much as on historically (narratively) situated responses.  My own vision of African American poetry and poetic tradition is invested in memory.  My subjectivity is invested in preservation and in what the poetry induces us to do for a future.  The anthology is a sampler.  When people complain that something is missing, I hope they will go out and read that something.  It was also important in making this book that young people who can spend $150.00 for tennis shoes have it at the affordable price of $6.99.

                Perhaps my mission as editor was to wade in the water and to practice a nice Southern madness of helping others to make trouble, so we might all get wet with wisdom.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature

Tougaloo College